Living on the Cyber Border

Abstract

This article focuses on the political writings of minjian (unofficial) online writers to examine the richness, fluidity, and complexity of Chinese cyberspace. In a period in which Chinese society is undergoing rapid transformation, researchers have generally underestimated both this groups ability to express itself politically by using the Internet and the current states ability to improve modes of governmentality and apply more refined control mechanisms to minjian writers in particular and intellectuals in general. In this new domain, both the Chinese state and minjian writers have to negotiate new boundaries. On the one hand, by not identifying with either the state or the mainstream Chinese intelligentsia, minjian writers assert their new citizenship through receiving and interpreting information independently and holding very divergent political points of view. On the other, the state can also enlist new factors such as private capital to serve its control goal. The case of minjian online writers touches on a series of theoretical issues of great concern to anthropologists, among them citizenship, human agency, nationalism, political expression and practice, governmentality, and the relationship between state and intellectuals. This article is an attempt to contribute to a timely discussion of these issues through concrete ethnographic case studies.